Suddenly The Nightwind
Suddenly the nightwind comes
and scatters me like dust, leaves, stars, birds,
flakes of blood and paint from a dried rose
and I am nowhere again among the extracted windows
compiled like used theories in the mind-dump,
cataracts, fog, ice between their thermal panes
an obsolete encyclopedia of seeing, image, view,
skating rinks and skies that shattered like eggs
from which nothing ever flew.
Believe me when I tell you
there is not a flame or a shadow
as lost as I am when I fall like moonlit rain
from this endless pilgrimage of clouds
into the wells and watersheds, the dark godheads
and cracked mud of ancient creekbeds
once urgent with my flowing. And I am a fanatic
of unknowing when the darkness
overtakes me on the wing, an apostle
of undelivered monologues
humming like a powerline
in the ears of inattentive telephones,
the dirty needle of a compass
that has shared one too many directions
with the addicts of the north. In the freefall
of this vast space that confounds my eyes
with numberless illuminations, gravity
is just another superstition, light
a bride that leaves me standing at the altar,
baffled by absence, time, and futile distances.
Even the atoms of my body
are the liberated doves of a scuttled ark
that waits in vain for signs of land
when the waters roll me like a drunken sailor
far from any port of call
that ever pressed me into service.
I grieve like a passport
for vanished borders, circumferences
subsumed in parsimonious points
once radiant with lighthouses,
and all the clandestine crossings of my youth,
the zeniths, nadirs, transits,
all the date lines and ecliptics,
the equinoctial colures
that adorned my green meridians,
my perilous explorations,
with nautical clocks
and astrolabes that shone like jewellery.
Now I drift, an empty lifeboat
through unknown waters, the toy
of any wind and current
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poem by Patrick White
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